Thursday, April 22, 2010

Not Dead, But Sick Yet Still Working Hard

I am still struggling with my health and therefore am running behind on everything.

Earnings last month... were better by about $50. I'm not going to go back and look it all up to do a break down here at the moment. So we'll leave it at that.

Of course when eHow closed the WCP program, that was a setback. Current earnings are good on eHow, but not what they were last month. I expect it to decline.

My niche blogs seem to be in a steady state. I earn something almost daily BUT I am not making the big bucks yet. I'm trying to really focus on this as I have a few sites that are really taking off. Note that it took me almost a year to get this far, which is not very far. Still it's progress. I am happy to see it's not been a total waste of time.

Also, niche blogging is a SLOW income stream. If I was a better backlinker I probably could've done this faster, but not by much more than a few months. Niches have to age like wine. For the love of blogging...Build that time into your business model!!!!

I have an ebook that I had hoped to publish next month and ummm, yeah, that's probably not going to happen. I haven't been able to work on it for the last month due to illness and medication that gives me the attention span of a hummingbird on speed.

So that's that. What's new with you?

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The Deal with Demand Studios

Okay, folks, here it is in a nutshell, the down and dirty on Demand Studios.

Their editorial process (and frequently the editors themselves) suck.

This will be the single biggest problem with the change in how eHow operates. Hobbyists who flourished at eHow will not be able to cope with the mercurial nature of Demand Studios editorial review.

If Demand Studios had made a concurrent commitment to improve their editorial process (which has been a big complaint among their writers for years) I would be more optimistic about the big changes at eHow.

But they aren't.

Which means when/if I (or you) write an article about the color Blue and get an editor who tells me I must also mention the Moon Landing or else I'll get a rejection, I will be sh*t out of luck. As will you. This is a common editor issue and Demand Studios has consistently done nothing to address it.

For the time being, until the dust settles, I would do nothing for Demand Studios except upfront pay assignments. With upfront pay, they can't suddenly come back and pull the rug out from under your feet. You know you will never have the rights to the work vs. one day you have them, the next day you don't. I would take the income hit and just focus on other websites to diversify my earnings while waiting to see exactly what rises from the rubble.

And FYI the writing was on the wall for this change according to this interview:

"Large authority site content mills are all the rage in early 2010. Will they still be an effective business model in 2013?

It's tough to see how this could be quickly and effectively reined in, at least not by algorithm. I assume that this kind of empty filler content is not very useful for visitors — it certainly isn't for me. So I also assume it must be on Google's radar.

I'd say there's a certain parallel to the paid links war, and Google's first skirmishes in that arena gave then a few black eyes. So I expect any address to the cheap content mills to be taken slowly, and mostly by human editorial review.

The problem here is that every provider of freelance content is NOT providing junk - though some are. As far as I know, there is no current semantic processing that can sort out the two."

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Surviving the Ehowpocalypse

I have been sick and in the hospital so I haven't been online as much. It figures the day I start trying to catch up, ehow shuts down the writer's compensation program. I did kind of call it, didn't I? In the sense that I said the Terms of Service would be changing.

Here's what I think you need to do... and I'm not wasting words because I'm still pretty sick.

1.Get your articles up someplace else that doesn't care if it's duplicate content. I would not do a wholesale delete of ehow content because we might still be able to get some money in the short term. However, I would not expect that to last and, on the forums, the mods had said that, going forward, all terms could change and they specifically mentioned payment. Do not expect to continue to make money from ehow.

Expect at some point that your content will disappear or that you will remove it. So lining up another home is preparing for that moment. It will probably hurt your earnings short term, but should be a good move long term.

2.Rewrite your top earners for sites like Infobarrel, Hubpages, or Suite101 and other sites. (You need an Adsense account stat by the way.) You are going to need twice the amount of content on other sites to approximate eHow earnings, so get ready to work like a dog.

3.Build good back links to your new content.

4.Eventually, kill back links to ehow content.

5.Do the $1 trial at The Keyword Academy and learn everything you can about niche blogging. You need a new business model, this is a good one to explore and the skills will translate to almost anything you do online.

Do you have anything to add to this list?